There are two kinds of trends. The first kind of trend is the kind you know are going to burn out pretty quickly, and so you ignore and/or mock them until they go away. Instances of these trends: Crocs, dot-com millionaires, Blockbuster Video stores. All annoying in their own way, but retrospectively we’ll all look back on them and say, “Remember when we walked to Blockbuster in our Crocs to rent The Boondock Saints right before our second round of venture capital funding? Good times, good times.”

The second kind of trend is more insidious. These trends are more permanent, and reflect a tectonic shift in our attitudes toward life and technology. These you cannot ignore, and you must find a way to embrace or make peace with them. Otherwise, you become that guy in the corner of the room who scoffs at iPads and vows to write his new novel with pad and paper, “like nature intended.” Examples of these trends include the MP3, cargo shorts, and the Palin Brood. For better or worse, they’re not going anywhere, no matter how intense the desire to destroy or replace them.

Social gaming is a tricky little bitch. It looks like the first kind of trend, mostly because of FarmVille, which has singlehandedly taught most Facebook users how to hide their friends’ updates. Aside: Somebody has to tell these companies that automatic Facebook updates are killing their brands. Same with unearned re-tweets: if it isn’t funny, disgusting, or transcendent, you’re a corporate shill with a secret agenda and I’m automatically unfollowing you. /Aside.

Social gaming smells like bullshit, right? Somehow Zynga has convinced America that mindlessly clicking on stuff on your screen is somehow better than your actual job, which usually includes mindlessly clicking stuff on your screen. Now, Zynga’s not wrong. FarmVille is probably better than 90% of most of our jobs. Nobody yells at you, you reap the direct result of your clicks, and you get to keep all of what you produce. It’s probably the most fulfilling part of someone’s day right now, and if that keeps them from killing a random stranger, well God bless Zynga.

But let’s be honest. FarmVille sucks. It’s like earning frequent flyer miles in real time. And the worst part about it is that it’s spawned a thousand imitators, each of which is trying to pretend they didn’t just rip off the FarmVille code and plaster it into their fantasy/sci-fi/pornstar worlds. Playing social gaming right now is like voluntarily checking into a Thai sweatshop.

Look, as a group of recovering Dungeons and Dragons players, we understand the appeal of “leveling up.” It gives you the illusion of forward progress in a life that usually just waves you forward in the inevitable slouch toward death. It’s great to feel that you’re succeeding at something, even if it is poking your phone with your index finger six hundred times a day.

But we’re trapped here, as a culture. We’ve been “leveling up” since we developed loyalty programs. We can’t move beyond it. And social gaming is bigger than this. Social gaming puts a fun veneer on the tedious parts of life that make us want to blow our brains out. The pieces are starting to form with location-based services, and they’re only going to get better from here.

Social gaming is a trend that’s not going away. We love to compete. It’s going to take over every aspect of our lives until we can’t remember a time we didn’t race to find the easter egg in the 7-Eleven, or when we weren’t mayor of our favorite bar.

But we’re begging someone to come up with a new paradigm for social gaming that doesn’t involve leveling up and/or building some sort of quaint business in an industry that doesn’t exist anymore because, you know, capitalism. Something that actually makes you want to go spend money instead of actively hating the brands involved. Something distracting, immersive, increasingly challenging and ultimately rewarding, in a way that doesn’t make us wonder what we did with all the time we wasted when we were young.

Not that we’re against wasting time, mind you. We just want to remember it.

Is it just us, or does the “like” button (despite its recent release into the wild) seem so 2008. Yeah, that was cute….two years ago. Yes, “liking” something, even off site, will continue to be popular in a lazy man’s reflexive action kind of way. The reality is that sociallyinfluenced shopping has been around for a long time. Today’s war, however, is shaping up to be about location (as in check-ins) and tomorrow’s war precedes from there to the fussily named – internet of things (whereby we check into our can of Pringles).

What’s interesting about the congregation of all of these closely (annoyingly) related services is how they might integrate to breathe life into the social shopping meme. “Ha!,” you say, “That’s not interesting at all.” In our line of work and with our types of clients (i.e. retail, fashion, goods you can buy etc.) it could turn out be kind of interesting. With foursquare and Gowalla gaining momentum and facebook on the verge of launching their own location service it’s weird and kind of cool to see how folks have gone from “Twitter, that’s stupid” to “checking in” at every Taqueria and corn field airport. There’s something about the ease and specificity of broadcasting your location that makes it more frictionless that having to create a 140 character haiku every time. Its just here I am. And btw I’m at the restaurant you couldn’t get into. In fact, if you’re a mass-market retailer or in the event business you are very quickly going to be missing out on something potentially sticky if you’re not testing a location angle. This is the first leg of where we think social shopping is actually going – especially if you’re a high volume retailer. It’s not about tweeting your $ spent. It’s about adding interest value to retail or shopping stops you make all the time. Right now the only people actually activating this bandwagon seem to be bars and the occasional restaurant. That’s going to change.

The second sandbox is the Internet of things action. Bear with us; we’re going to reduce a big, huge mountain of many different opportunities down to the one angle that fits our thesis. The IOT comes in a few flavors – one is a product that acts (i.e. tweet their location) and interacts with other products; and another is a consumer responding directly to products (versus a fb post about the new Green Tea Smoothie you love, you actually check into that Smoothie as if you’re foursquaring a Starbucks). I’m sure there are lots of other angles but we’re the kind of people that need to keep things simple. As a social shopping thought experiment if you combine the social mechanic of checking into a location and then checking into a product you buy at that location – and there’s a reward for that – and then you turbo charge it with a frictionless/seamless payment option. There’s a game play aspect that’s cool and a new kind of interest added to mundane activity that’s exciting and oh by the way you’re spending real money (meaning more than micro-payments for livestock in Farmville – not that there’s anything wrong with that).

And so that third piece becomes the seamless payment piece. Beyond simply broadcasting a purchase it’s the ability to effortlessly make the purchase as part of the social shopping mechanic. And then, what the heck, that purchase is broadcast and then your friends can “like” it (it’s not going away) and the world spins madly on J.

Of course, facebook, would like all of that activity to stay in house and they might have a leg up based on low barrier to usage. I currently access: facebook, foursquare, Gowalla, GetGlue and…oh yea, Twitter. It’s not a huge pain but something has got to give to gain widespread and commonplace adoption for the kind of social shopping dynamic described above. My wife, for instance, is not going through multiple services to do any of that (unless the reward are huge). Despite their ubiquity its’ not a guarantee that facebook would win that bet, foursquare with enough consumer acceptance could easily close that distance – they own geography. Frankly, Apple could win that war (or some combination of these actors), it’s the phone that owns all that activity on the go anyway and with a seamless payment system in place, next stop world domination.

Stay tuned for a follow up post around “the return of the brand community.” Remember that meme? We’re talking shopping here though, and not just Gilt style bargain driven flash mobs. That’s the kind of soil seeding that would really make some of these local social trends catch fire.

Seems obvious, and it is, but this rule is broken all the time. Let’s just start from a place of doing something well. Mmm’kay! It’s a good life lesson really not just for an Avatar listicle. Hey, if you say you’re going to re-invent film-making then you need to actually go ahead and re-invent film-making. Box. Checked.

2) I.T.S.S. (It’s the story stupid)

Yeah, bad acronym, but the point is that people still care about a simple story well told. We can quibble over a few things (dialogue?) here and there but Avatar is your classic hero’s journey, your basic quest and growth story. And you know what? People love that! They still do…maybe they just needed to see it with fresh eyes. The authenticity of that simple Aristotelian good/bad, 3 act, sword in the stone story still sings with audiences.

3) Immersive story-telling equals Brand Immersion

“This 3D stuff is gold, Jerry! Its gold!” Used to be that a great performance was enough to suck you so deeply into the story you didn’t want to leave. Or the writing was so vivid and provocative you couldn’t put the book down. Looks like Cameron has raised the bar just a wee bit in that regard. Lots of online buzz about Avatars viewers who have sunk into depression because they can’t actually “live” in the world of Avatar. The sense memory of that world (Pandora) is so real you desperately want to return. Could the same soon be said of a branded experience? Well…its just content. Well crafted content with a story people care about (see above). So, you might laugh at world centered around Tide w/Bleach but if the story and the brand come together to create something really experiential people will pay attention.

Think about it this way, Avatar is essentially a 2.5 hour commercial for Greenpeace and people walk out “loving it.”

4) Community. Community. Community.

We might be sick of hearing about brand communities. But damned if it doesn’t still work. When passions are ignited people come together if whatever forums are available to discuss and extend and deepen their relationship with that “idea” or “story” or “product.” Why does creating an outlet for brand communities still work? Essentially because its not a gimmick. It certainly can be in the wrong hands but if you make something good (see rule #1) and then provide clever and provocative ways for folks to share about that good thing connections are going to happen. People will find a way to do it themselves (I’m sure there are Avatar meet-ups happening) so you might as well benefit from it in some way.

5) Three D – Schmeee D.

The technology is just the tool. The Idea is the Engine. Cameron had apparently been dreaming about the idea of this world and this story for years. And then developed the technology to bring it to life. This is the proper order of things, not “hey, what do I do with this cool 3D camera?” You start at the molecular level with a creative idea that’s powerful and then realize it in the best way possible.

We are working harder than ever before to find cool and interesting stuff. Between Digg and StumbleUpon and Reddit and MetaFilter and Facebook and Twitter, we are the ones who vote on the news, send it to the top, and retweet the hell out of it to make sure it gets massive and unprecedented exposure. It’s a simple system, inarguable for anyone who has faith in democracy.

Here’s the problem. I don’t want to do this much work to find stuff I want to read. For every interesting take on Google vs. Facebook, or a solid analysis of the Iranian nuclear question, there are about fifty useless posts, either lists or lols or scraped content. My Twitter feed has become a series of Burma-Shave signs, haikus leading down a road to nowhere. I may be able to read anything I want, but I’m doing all this work to find it, and by the time I get it, I’m no longer interested.

It’s not enough to have people act as information filters: people like you have to act as filters, or else it’s just not going to satisfy. You need trusted sources with a wide range of access to information. If you just choose your friends, you’re going to end up in an echo chamber, retweeting lol posts. You need independent sources of interesting stories, told in a way that’s compelling, challenging, and informative. We used to have something like this: they were called magazines and newspapers.

That’s why this spasm of eulogizing Ye Olde Media feels a little premature. We’re not going to wake up to find a dead tree on our front doorstep anymore. But if you want trusted, analytical, valued information, you’re not going to hook into the Tehran Twitter feed and watch people misspell words. You’re going to click on the New York Times, or the Economist, or Time. For the time being, media brands still matter. They help us stop digging through veins of information, and gain perspective on what’s true.

Our agency has just “given birth” to an official Facebook brand presence for lia sophia. Their business is largely driven by referrals and relationships, and social media tools align perfectly with how their Advisors work. We’ve also created a photo sharing app that brings the lia sophia brand to life – by literally allowing fans to share jewelry on photos of their friends. The photo sharing app was designed to tap into the sharing functionality Facebook provides. With a simple call to action of “add lia sophia jewelry to your friends’ photos”, a user can select a photo from their own albums or their friends’ available albums they want to decorate with lia sophia jewelry. Complete with cropping and rotation features, users can get their touches of jewelry just right before sharing. Users can save the photos and post their friends’ walls which generate powerful news feeds for awareness. The app also allows a user save an unlimited amount of images that they have created and sent to friends and any that they have received from friends.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of online retailer Zappos.com was kind enough to debut a new feature on Black Match. Five questions for a CEO. For those under rocks, they sell shoes.

1) What advantages for the Zappos brand come from being so accessible and transparent across social/digital platforms?

At Zappos, our #1 priority is our company culture. Our belief is that if
we get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like delivering great
customer service or building a long term enduring brand, will happen
naturally on its own. We’ve formalized the definition of our culture into10 core values:

Being transparent isn’t really something that’s specific to social/digital
platforms. Core value #6 is “Build Open and Honest Relationships With
Communication”… It’s just part of who we are.

2) As a company that has famously avoided broadcast advertising in favor
of “actions” that advertise (i.e. free shipping) what was the trigger point for your recent ad campaign? How are you/will you measure success (i.e. sales only)?

We take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and
invest it into the customer experience instead. However, we do spend as
much money on direct marketing as possible when it pays for itself.
Using hypothetical numbers, this means that if we spend $1 on paid
advertising, if we get back $10 in sales, then we will spend as much money
as possible as long as we continue to hit that ratio. The problem is that
there isn’t enough advertising inventory out there that meets that ratio.
What we found was that if we invest some money in offline brand
advertising such as magazine ads or TV ads, then that improves the ROI of
our online campaigns, so that altogether we are still hitting the ratio
that makes sense for us.

It’s really been organic. We aren’t really about “digital/social media” (a
term which I personally dislike). We’re really just about figuring outways where we can best express our core values (our culture) and our
commitment to great customer service. We’ve found that Twitter has been
great for that, but so has the telephone, which is why we put our 1-800
number at the top of every page of our web site. The telephone isn’t very
newsworthy, but it’s one of our best branding devices.

4) Has/How has the Zappos brand been challenged over the past 12 months?

I think the biggest challenge with building our brand is that Zappos is an
experiential brand. Anyone can start another web site tomorrow and make
the same claims that we do about delivering great customer service, but
it’s not until you actually purchase something from us, or call our 1-800
number, or visit our offices, that you can start to tell the difference
between another company and the Zappos brand and culture.

5) There are obviously tricks that traditional retailers are stealing from you (I’m looking at you piperlime.com); are there dance moves you’re borrowing from traditional/brick and mortar retailers?

We really don’t focus very much on what other retailers are doing. We just
focus on what our customers and employees tell us and then try to deliver
the best customer experience possible while still meeting our financial
goals.

Twitter has gone from a precious little idea to a respectable mini-blogging service to a massive cultural phenomenon in a little more than a year. And I think a lot of us are looking around at each other, nodding, saying, yes, this is awesome, I get it, tweet tweet birdhouse tweetdeck rt @imsohip.

I think some people have a legitimate use for Twitter: comedians, technical support, and Barack Obama. I think the rest of us are fumbling around for a way to stay relevant on it. Because Twitter suffers from the same problem blogs, podcasts, and user-generated content does: most people either have something interesting to say but can’t figure out how to tell it, or don’t have something interesting to say and disguise that fact with wry observational humor that went out of style with Seinfeld.

Here’s the great thing about Twitter: you can only communicate in 140-character bursts, so if it sucks, it’s over. Here’s the crappy thing about Twitter: we haven’t learned how to create stories on it yet. What we’re getting is fragments, little tic-tacs of information that hit us like pellets and we pretend are refreshing and informative and clever, but what we’re leaving off is: for a tweet. As in, that’s cute. For a tweet. We’re grading on a 140-character curve.

I’m not saying there aren’t uses for this sort of communication, but that they’re more limited than we think they are. If I am wrong — and I am never wrong — then maybe it works as a meta-communicator and tastemaker, directing your attention to bit.ly links. The Japanese are writing novels this way, but they’re not necessarily the sanest of nations, pop-culturally speaking. Pogue has decided to let others write a book for him, which is stupid, lazy and just like him. It’s nice when you have a question to pop it into the ether and get responses. And it helps to have a brand, a mission, and something worthwhile to say. Three times a day. Every day.

We’re tweeting, we follow other tweeters, so we’re biting the hand that feeds us. But it feels like the Twitter phenomenon, like billions of “Margaritas! WOO HOO!” tweets themselves, has a shelf life, until something better comes along.

This is post one of a new feature on Black Match, where, like Nicholas Cage in Next, we peer just a few minutes into the future.

Hosted (even branded!) micro-blogging. Think Twitter w/a purpose – cooler, faster, stronger. How about a private “tweetspace” where volunteers or contributors speak up about or around a particular event. Or how about a public tweestpace that’s branded/customized to a particular company or cause, where tweets from anyone who cares or contributes shows up. Imagine if ESPN created a private micro-blogging platform for their fantasy leagues: 140 characters + trash talk = gold, jerry! gold! What a powerful way to track cause engagement (and btw brand engagement.) Yes, Twitter has already been engaged to drive charity, but social technology that helps brands and their causes both benefit is still virgin territory. There are a couple of horses entering this race: twitteronia and status.net. Of course, this has worlds of possibilities for regular users, just like those who have made wordpress and ning successful; but as a marketer I’m really excited about the possibility for brands. And the really cool thing is that could integrate your regular tweetstream into your private tweets (so you’re not running back and forth between two places.) Those brands or groups that seem to inspire or form natural communities are a no brainer for this kind of functionality. Think moms! for instance or Big Ten fans or skiers or, hell, even WOW players. You add some kind mobile accessibility of top of this and *shazam* you got yourself some of that nitroglycerine kids. For more future-peering, reading of entrails and general brand astrology we can be reached @ www.supergeniusllc.com.

It’s one of those trends clients are tired of hearing us drone on about – that one of the most social (and if you must, “viral”) activities companies and brands can practice is cause related marketing. And conversely, non-profit brands and corporate social responsibility are intensely digital/social propositions. The reality is that given the state of the economy more people and families than ever find themselves on the roles of the unemployed and subsequently more “in need” than ever before. And, honestly, it’s this state of affairs that presents brands or NGOs or CSR departments with an opportunity to make a deeper emotional connection with their consumers/stakeholders.

Brands, like people, are increasingly being judged by what they do and not simply what they say in advertisements. The upside of being held to this higher standard is that those brands that deliver are rewarded with greater consumer commitment than mere :30 television ads could have purchased. You combine this shift in consumer approval of action over “advertisement” with digitally driven succession of control to consumers and you’re left with a pretty powerful sweet spot. A sweet spot where brands that invite consumers into a conversation “win,” and brands that invite consumer into a conversation and having something meaningful to say (hello causes) “really win.” Why? Because a conversation that matters is one that you’ll invite your friends to participate in and not feel guilty about.

There’s also the Obama effect. The ability of technology or social media to efficiently aggregate inputs (comments, conversations, contributions.) This is the ability to go beyond even the accumulation of checks from individuals into the rarefied realm of micro-gifts or micro-payments on a social media platform and make them cost effective and meaningful.

Who’s doing it right? Well, one platform that gives brands an easy way out is Facebook. What’s that you say? You’re tired of hearing about FB, well deal with it, because I can count on one hand the number of brands that are doing it right. And of those most have a cause/charity related component or angle at some point. To wit:

“Feeding America.” Amazingly strong and consistent voice on FB, and online in general. In the sea of so many dead brand pages that never update and never talk to their “fans” let along consumers, this NGO stands out as a brand that has strong social media presence. By the way a presence they maximize with clever applications and extensions – see “bread art” and the Kraft “Feeding America” challenge as good examples of social media in action. The FB app “Causes” remains one of their most consistently powerful platforms for brand calls to action. See “Ben & Jerry’s.”

Great. You’re intrigued but wonder what’s next? What to do now? Well, one thing we like to do is peer a few minutes (let’s call it five) into the future. Why five? Because any further and it’s not useful to those of us who need to generate action (sales, interest, activity etc.) TODAY. So, five minutes out, here’s what we see:

Branded micro-blogging. Think Twitter but cooler, faster, stronger. How about a private “tweetspace” where volunteers or contributors speak up about or around a particular event. Or how about a public tweestpace that’s branded/customized to a particular company or cause, where tweets from anyone who cares or contributes shows up. What a powerful way to track cause engagement (and btw brand engagement.) Yes, Twitter has already been engaged to drive charity, but social technology that helps brands and their causes both benefit is still virgin territory.

Cause Communities. Friendfeed for the charity set. Imagine a private social net or even a branded FB page where content from everyone touching a particular cause is aggregated. Think video feeds from the organic farm you sponsor in Mexico, or micro posts from the youth volunteers in NYC mashed up with the corporate blog about the entire program. Cool.

Do Better Now. Like I said before. Very few brands have their FB geography in order let along the things that are five minutes into the future. I’d argue for getting that online territory sorted first. Get your FB or Tumblr or whatever page/community sorted properly and integrated with your corporate assets and launch from there. By the way…call us if you need help with this!

There’s a reason casuse marketing has exploded at the same time that the web is becoming more social. While there’s some concern about the potential for mis-application. As the level of chatter increases it’s harder to filter out the good stuff. Those brands that are clearly aligned with the good stuff – products and also causes they support will tend to rise to the top of the global conversation. For deeper discussions about how social media can amplify your cause marketing please connect with us at mat@supergeniusllc.com or wbc@supergeniusllc.com.

Let’s say you want to take sailing lessons. You go down to the pier, and pick up two brochures: one that’s glossy and slick, explaining how fun sailing is, with pictures of smiling sailors drinking champagne at sunset, put out by a well-known shipping company. The second one is obviously made on someone’s Macintosh, by two guys who live by the ocean, and tells you the nuts and bolts of what you’re going to learn.

Which company do you choose? Replace “sailing” with “social media” in the above paragraph, and it’s likely you’ll take the glossy brochure. Because they’re professional shippers, right? They know the ocean. They’ve been there before. The problem is, they have no idea how to actually get in the boat and push off the dock.

This is the trouble with PR firms right now. Their traditional media world is disintegrating around them, and they’re flinging themselves into social media like it’s water and they’re on fire. Because as Public Relations becomes less about newspapers (dying), magazines (gasping), broadcast (fragmenting) and blogs (moving to Twitter), the only thing they can see that makes sense as a future business model has an F at the beginning and a K at the end and has “aceboo” in the middle.

But PR companies are shipping companies: they are built to deliver big messages along traditional lines to create “news” and “events.” They are not built to scale. It’s likely that they got interested in social media about the same time you did, and are about the same place on the learning curve. It is also likely that they do not use social media.

This point bears repeating: while they know what social media is, and how it works, and who else is on there, if they don’t use it, they’re useless to you.

Creating and sustaining conversations with consumers, users, people requires a skill set built around engagement and participatory storytelling. Frankly, if the engine of online today is conversation then the fuel is content. To keep the conversation going, to keep the dialogue moving requires more than just words in the air, it requires the ability to develop social tools (apps, widgets, etc.) and useful content (video, games, etc.) and cede some control to your consumers. Sure, we (agency/brand/whomever) need to participate in those conversations but it starts with a strategic understanding of the sandbox we want to create and the technical capacity to create the right pails and shovels to go in that sandbox.

About

Super Genius LLC is a digital media and creative incubator that excels at bringing fresh, new thinking to existing strategy as well as blank-page strategic development. Our mission is to open up unique and exciting ways of connecting brands and consumers.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." William Gibson